An example process

Here’s an example of a page that has been marked by keyboard, and the moderator has found an adding error, which they’ve corrected. The checker re-keys the numbers as part of the checking procedure.

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Here’s a couple of the steps shown on their own, showing the moderator has only to check the page if all is ok, but can handle minor issues and communicate them back to the office. If there needed to be additional stages, we’ve got some other coloured “query” and “resolve” sidebars waiting in the wings.

Performance

Since we’re going for robustness and safety, we’re rendering all the annotations at each step, exporting to an image file, reimporting that into a new page that has the marking forms added, then exporting that again (phew!) – the stuff in blue all happens in a single command.

The process in averages around 1.4sec/page/stage at our current quality setting of 90 JPEG quality at 175dpi.

mark             1.3s/page
moderate-active  1.3s/page
check            1.4s/page

The round trip to collect scripts from our exam halls easily comes in at over 45 minutes, or enough time to process about 2,000 pages.